Small companies with part-time staff need to manage schedules effectively, so their business isn’t disrupted. Merging attendance software with other business-critical software, like payroll, can be a game-changer for workforce management.
Imagine having a cleaning company with a staff of 50 people across three cities. You have a spreadsheet with their names, locations, hours available and requested days off. You try to create a schedule that fills everyone’s hours based on the client availability. But scrolling through a spreadsheet makes blind spots. Multiple people were scheduled for the same job, others were left off the rota entirely, and some were scheduled for their time off. So now, you spend time adjusting schedules and informing the staff of changes, creating frustration and confusion.
Managing a rota schedule manually in spreadsheets presents many risks for business owners. Software that manages schedules and payroll in one place can mitigate these risks so businesses can focus on maintaining a high level of service and keep employees happy.
Benefits to comprehensive rota planning and payroll software
Benefit #1: Calculate pay based on time worked
Your staff may have variable pay rates and hours. You need to calculate tax and potential bonuses or rewards. Calculating pay manually through hours tracked in a spreadsheet is error-prone and risky. The chances are high of incorrect input, an error in the document, or missed essential updates.
Combining your rota planner and payroll software reduces this risk dramatically. Employee pay information, schedule, and actual hours worked are all stored in one place. Since employees use a time clock through employee scheduling software, like Moonworkers, there is no need to go back to a spreadsheet to calculate the payout manually. Instead, the software recognises the hours and pays out automatically.
Benefit #2: Track attendance with precision
It’s hard to track attendance when you match hours worked with hours scheduled through a spreadsheet. Information needs to be matched up and vetted, or workers could forget to input their times. It’s harder to factor in tardiness, calling in sick or leaving early. The more employees you have tracking their time and locations, the more complex the spreadsheet becomes. Manual rotas risk over or under booking your staff, forgetting time off requests, or lacking visibility into the actual hours worked.
There is an additional risk to employees as well. If it takes too long to get the schedule, staff can be frustrated and lose confidence. It is not worth risking turnover because of rota planning.
Automated rota software like Moonworkers address many of these risks. For example, providing inputs for each employee creates the schedule automatically based on the factors required, like minimum and maximum hours, time off, and location. In addition, a calendar visual makes it easy to see gaps.
Using employee scheduling software to create your staff rota saves time piecing together everyone’s schedule and builds confidence across the team. Moonworkers also enables staff to punch in and out of work, tracking the time and location using Google Maps. You can sync up when they started and finished a job and compare it to the timeframe scheduled without creating messy formulas in spreadsheets.
Benefit #3: Manage employees with ease
Other employees are impacted when workers call in sick or need to change shifts. It would take time to sort through a manually managed schedule to determine who is available, when they last worked, time off, and remaining open hours. Employee scheduling software makes it easy to fill those gaps quickly by applying those filters automatically and identifying the appropriate replacement.
Absence and lateness are also hard to track in spreadsheets, which is a risk for a business owner if you’re paying based on the schedule. Software like Moonworkers enables managers to monitor when employees clock in and out allows you to pay appropriately, track employee and shift patterns, and complete the job correctly. You can even have a field manager pre-approve daily clock-ins and rates and give comments on the workers.
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